Flat Earth Crackpot May Die Soon

A flat earther from California has built a homemade rocket out of scrap metal and plans to fly it a whopping 1800 feet high because, for some weird reason, he thinks that will show that the earth is flat. Yeah, I think it’s safe to say logic isn’t his strong suit, though I doubt we’ll have much longer to say that.

Assuming the 500-mph, mile-long flight through the Mojave Desert does not kill him, Mike Hughes told the Associated Press, his journey into the atmosflat will mark the first phase of his ambitious flat-Earth space program.

Hughes’s ultimate goal is a subsequent launch that puts him miles above the Earth, where the 61-year-old limousine driver hopes to photograph proof of the disc we all live on.

“It’ll shut the door on this ball earth,” Hughes said in a fundraising interview with a flat-Earth group for Saturday’s flight. Theories discussed during the interview included NASA being controlled by round-Earth Freemasons and Elon Musk making fake rockets from blimps.

I imagine they’ve already begun engraving his name on the Darwin Award (not to be confused with the Friend of Darwin award that I received in 2009 from the National Center for Science Education, which did not require me to die or remove myself from the reproductive gene pool in order to be eligible). I only hope that his epitaph says “Here lies an idiot. Don’t be an idiot.”